‘He is one of the biggest sex offenders of the last 20 years’: the powerful statement from the daughter of the man who drugged his wife so that strangers could abuse her

Dominique Pelicot is “one of the biggest sex offenders of the past 20 years,” his daughter told a French court on Friday on charges of drugging his wife so that she could be raped by strangers.

“How can one rebuild oneself when one knows?” asked Caroline Darian, daughter of the main defendant and who uses the pseudonym used to write the book “I Stopped Calling You Dad” to protect her family.

The woman gave her testimony for about 20 minutes at the Avignon criminal court in southern France, where her father and 50 other men, aged between 26 and 40, are being tried for aggravated rape, an AFP journalist noted.

Darian recalled how her life “changed” on November 2, 2020, when she learned the facts. Her mother, who had just been told by the police that she had been raped for years, called her to tell her.

“My mother told me: ‘I spent almost the whole day at the police station. Your father drugged me to rape me with strangers.’ I had to look at photos,” according to her daughter’s account.

My mother told me: ‘I spent most of the day at the police station. Your father drugged me to rape me with strangers.’ I had to see photos.

“I call my brothers. We are helpless. We cry. We do not understand what is happening to us. We are suffering, a pain that I would not wish on anyone,” said Caroline Darian, through tears.

A day later, on November 3, 2020, the police in Carpentras, in the south of France, explained to the three brothers that “between 30 and 50” men raped their mother Gisèle Pelicot.

At the end of the investigation, Investigators estimated that 72 men sexually assaulted Pelicot between July 2011 and October 2020, of whom only 50 were identified.

That same day, police showed him two photos of a naked woman, apparently asleep. “We see her buttocks in close-up. This woman is sleeping in a fetal position. I don’t recognize her,” Darian recalled in court.

The investigator then assures her that it is her. “I discover that my father photographed me, secretly, naked. Why?”, her daughter wondered, now convinced that her father also drugged her, like her mother.

‘The police saved my life’

“The police saved my life,” Gisèle Pelicot said calmly and determinedly in court on Thursday. The 71-year-old victim was the protagonist of the fourth day of this mega-trial.

The case, which has horrified France, came to light by chance when her husband, Dominique Pelicot, 71, was caught in 2020 in a shopping centre filming up the skirts of customers.

Investigators then found on her computers, hard drives and USB drives nearly 4,000 photos and videos of the victim, visibly unconscious, while dozens of strangers raped her.

“My world is collapsing, everything is collapsing, everything I built for 50 years,” said his wife, recalling the moment when the police showed her some photographs on November 2, 2020.

In the image, “I am inert, in my bed and they are raping me. These are barbaric scenes,” she told the five judges about the rapes organized by the father of her three children.

That day, The victim refused to watch videos found by investigators of the approximately 200 rapes she suffered first in the Paris region and then in Mazan, in the south of France, until 2020.

“They treat me like a rag doll,” she said, “I wonder how I endured it,” adding that she was “sacrificed on the altar of vice.” “The body is warm, not cold, but I am dead in my bed.”

In most cases, these men were not wearing a condom. “By an extraordinary stroke of luck, (…) she escaped HIV, syphilis and hepatitis,” said medical expert Anne Martinat Sainte-Beuve, adding that the woman contracted four sexually transmitted infections.